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This weekend we made the journey down to Somerset to see Matthew and Ellie. We started out at about 9:30 on Saturday morning, and got there without too many problems at about 2:00PM. The roads were surprisingly clear, except for the A303 by Stonehenge!

On Sunday morning we went to church with them in Shepton Mallet. It was nice to have a slightly more traditional Anglican service, although the church was rather traditionally cold! That’s the problem with these big stone buildings – they’re a nightmare to heat, especially in August when you’re not expecing it to be cold!

Afterwards we went to a local pub for lunch, and then we headed back and watched some “Fawlty Towers”. Then we had some tea and played “Mexican Train” – followed by making some rather random, silly models of various things out of the domino style bricks. It was a fun evening!

On Monday we headed into Wells to have a look around. Wells is best known for its beautiful cathedral, and we had a good look around. It was indeed stunning, and well worth a visit if you’re in the area. But the other reason we wanted to go to Wells was because it was where “Hot Fuzz” was filmed! Apparently Edgar Wright grew up in Wells and wanted to film it there. We saw the church (St Cuthbert’s, where the reporter was … decapitated), the fountain (where the human statue was stood outside), and The Swan hotel (where Simon Pegg’s character stays). In the evening we watched Hot Fuzz again and could actually recognise the High St – they’d digitally removed the cathedral from a few shots but it’s very recognisable as Wells!

Anyway, it was a lovely weekend in general – we’ll have to go down and have a proper explore sometime. The area is beautiful, if a little rainy (well, it was at the weekend – but then I say that coming from an area which apparently has the least amount of rain in the country).

In other news, we are on holiday this week and next! This week we’re at home doing various things, but next week we’re going up to Edinburgh and we’re really looking forward to it 🙂

Well, just when you wait for ages for a rant to come along, two come along at once! Although actually, with me you never have to wait that long for a rant to come along.

The first was was inspired by a business card I found left on our doormat this afternoon. It was from William H Brown – the estate agents. It’s just a normal business card, with the exception of “please call me” being written in pen on the card. But wait! – it’s not written in pen, it’s actually printed on the card, and made to look like pen!

And this is what annoys me. It’s designed to look like it’s written in pen (it does look very much like it), making it seem more personal, thus making people more likely to call. I don’t know, it just struck me as being… well, a bit fraudulent. Trying to get people to call you by pretending that you’re writing them a personal message. I know I’m making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill, but still, if they really do want me to call them perhaps a brief message with what they want would be better.

The second thing that annoyed me is the proms – specifically, the piece I’ve just heard: “Traces” by Rebecca Saunders. It was a classical piece, as in – it used the orchestra. But it didn’t have a discernable tune. It was reminiscent of the random mid-20th century classical music – just random bits and pieces, nothing discernible.

It was undoubtedly very clever, but the problem is I think these kind of pieces are purely for music critics who like to pat themselves on the back and say how clever it is. It’s not for people who actually, you know, just like music and don’t want to analyse something. I just can’t be doing with this kind of “artsy” rubbish… currently they’re playing Chopin’s 2nd Piano Concerto, which is much better! Much more beautiful.

Ah well, not so much of a rant tonight, but still!

Well, after the busyness of the past couple of weekends we had a quiet one this week!

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping in the morning, and … well, didn’t do much for the rest of the day! In he afernoon Jo came round with her baby (Evie) so it was nice to see them.

On Sunday we had church in the morning, and then Sunday@6 in the evening.

Oh, one thing I didn’t mention was last Wednesday – Matthew came round to stay the night, as he had a meeting in Chelmsford on the Thursday morning. So A-M and Sarah came round and we all had a BBQ together with leftovers from last weekend. It was a gorgeous day, couldn’t have asked for better, so it was a very pleasant evening!

And… that’s about all for now. Apologies for a boring post, but… well, normal service and all that 😉

… Crossring‘s coming back!

A few years ago I was involved with a site called Crossring, started up by a friend of mine called Simon. It was undoubtedly one of the best Christian websites around for young-ish people (I think it started off being aimed towards students, but we reached a lot of different people).

Anyway, due to no-one having the time to maintain it the website shut down, but come September 1st it will be back up again at the old address! Simon has asked me to write a few articles over the next few months – the initial series will be on Mark’s gospel. I’ve been busy writing the first one over the past week or so.

So, if you’re interested in Christian things, come 1st September do check it out – but in the meantime, if you’re a Twitter user you can follow the Crossring Twitter account for updates.

Well, I didn’t just have one day for a birthday this time round – I had a weekend! Well, sort of.

On Saturday afternoon, a whole bunch of people came round for a BBQ. This included, but was not limited to (just in case I forget anybody, which I hope I don’t!), Anne-Marie, Sarah, Kev L, Caroline, Tom, Alex, Dan, Jenny, Tash, and our next-door-neighbours Paul and Mary. I’ve put a few photos up on Facebook, so if you’re a friend of mine there you’ll be able to see them.

Anyway, it went really well – eating lots of food and playing random games up until the late evening! Apart from getting bitten by midges, I think people had a good time and it was really nice to see them all 🙂 Particularly Kev L, who I haven’t seen in ages.

On Sunday morning we went to church in the morning, and then in the evening went to Sunday@6. Apart from everything that could go wrong actually going wrong (technically speaking that is – oh the joys of having a newly installed building!), it was a good service. The music particularly seemed to go well. Perhaps if things go badly you can’t rely on yourselves, which is maybe where God is able to step in. Perhaps a lesson to be learnt there in general, I don’t know!

Anyway. This evening we went round to Mum and Dad’s for another BBQ, which was really nice! It’s unusual for me to actually be at home for my birthday, so it made a pleasant change. Right, I think it’s getting late so I’d better stop there!

… weddings!

That’s right. On Saturday we headed over to Peterhouse College, Cambridge for the wedding of Mark and Phillippa (Mark is a former member of Fordham and our home group). The wedding was in the chapel at the college, and was led by Andy Saville. It was a lovely service – the details had obviously been very carefully thought through, and it showed. Afterwards we wandered through into the garden for drinks, and then had dinner in one of the rooms. So it was a lovely time in general!

Afterwards we headed over to Freckenham Village Hall for what remained of the reception of Matt and Suzi’s wedding. Matt and Suzi are also former members of Fordham and our home group (strangely enough), they just happened to be getting married on the same day! We couldn’t go to two, but we did manage to get to a couple of hours of the reception and have a good chat with Matt and Suzi, as well as Chris and Eleanor.

So it was a busy but very pleasant day!

On Sunday we were much less busy – we had the usual morning service and Sunday@6, but not too much else apart from that.

So that’s pretty much it for the time being. Other than, some new books have arrived which I’m looking forward to reading – “The Great Divorce” and “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis, which have come highly recommended, and a book called “Naturalism” by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. All look fascinating, so I will enjoy reading them and will review here when I’m done.

As nothing much happened this weekend, I thought now would be a good time to talk about Lilypond. Lilypond, as in, the computer program for typesetting / engraving sheet music.

The reason I’ve been using it is because Chris, the co-leader of the Sunday@6 band, has written a few songs. Unfortunately he doesn’t read music, and so we just had lyrics and chords to work with up until now. A couple of weeks ago I thought I’d try and transcribe songs on the piano, and then typeset them using Lilypond.

I was quite impressed with the results! Lilypond is a pretty powerful program – it’s been in development for a long time, and is pretty mature by now. It produces really good looking output as well – I’d say probably higher quality than many equivalent software packages (even ones you have to pay for…)

The only issue is, it’s a bit like LaTeX: you type in your formatting commands in a text editor, and that then gets converted by Lilypond into a PDF (or PostScript file, or even MIDI). Now, for a programmer like me that’s not too bad, but for someone who is used to pointing and clicking, that’s not going to work. Still. It does mean there’s an awful lot of power at your fingertips. Unfortunately, this does mean that it takes a while to learn the program.

I spent ages trying to figure out how to create a simple song with separate lyrics and music for the verse and chorus (it’s a bit complicated to explain). It seems there was nothing on the internet – apart from a few mailing list posts – to help. So, I finally managed to cobble something together, and I present it here for the benefit of people in the same situation as me 🙂

Download test.ly and run it through Lilypond. That should hopefully get you started.

But I also recommend having a good read through the Lilypond documentation – I’m still only a newbie, but I find it gets easier the more I know!

Yesterday evening I was listening to music on Spotify. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, basically it’s a program which lets you listen to any one of its huge archive of songs – for free. The thing is, you don’t download any of the songs to your computer: it’s all done by streaming.

The upside is that you can listen to pretty much any song or album you want, without having to pay. (You do have to listen to an advert every few songs, but if you can deal with that it’s fine). The downside is that you must be at a computer to listen to music – which is no good if you want to listen to music on the go.

But it did get me round to thinking though: are we moving to a model where (eventually) no-one owns their own music – i.e. people pay a subscription fee and then can listen to it whenever they like? There is something in me which rebels against that notion – I still buy CDs because I like having a physical product. Buying an MP3 seems a bit wrong somehow, because MP3s are so… ephemeral. It just doesn’t seem right to pay for something which could be gone in a second (i.e. a hard drive crash or something like that).

This problem wouldn’t exist with Spotify (or something similar) though – if your hard drive crashed, you could presumably just re-install and get back onto Spotify and it would be as if nothing had changed. Functionally, if Spotify were available wirelessly (on, say, a portable music player like my iPod) then would there be any difference at all between buying music and leasing it? As long as it’s available wherever you want to listen to it, what difference does it make?

The other thing is, there is waaaaaay too much music out there for me to actually own. I was listening to a couple of bands on Spotify last night who I like, and would quite like to get the albums… but if I bought every album I heard and liked from there, it would bankrupt me in short order! So actually having a Spotify style model is useful – they can provide far more music than I would ever be able to afford.

But this led me onto another related subject: is the concept of ownership in general going the same way? – for certain things at least. Apparently it’s quite popular these days to lease a car: the lease company is responsible for servicing the car, and you pay a monthly fee and drive it. I haven’t looked into pricing but that actually sounds like quite an attractive prospect – having a car is expensive, and it may actually work out cheaper to lease a car.

I don’t think the concept of ownership is going to go away any time soon – obviously a lease model is only going to work for a certain subset of things – but it did make me ponder how much we’re going to move in that direction. And whether we’re going to lose anything because of it. There is some satisfaction in having your own car … but at the same time, would I be prepared to sacrifice that for the convenience of having someone else look after it? I think I just might.

Thanks to the summer holidays, not much is going on at the moment! It’s been rather nice having the free evenings. We’ve been so busy for so long, it’s fantastic just to be able to get home in an evening and not have to go out to home group, Moore Course, youth club, music practice, PCC meetings, or whatever else we have to do. Next year we will definitely be cutting down the amount of stuff we do!

So, on Friday night we had a nice evening in. On Saturday afternoon, I helped our friend Sarah to buy a car! She passed her test a few weeks ago and so was looking to buy a relatively cheap small car. Unfortunately, there aren’t many cheap small cars around at the moment: because of the cheap road tax and insurance, it seems most people want small cars! But still, after looking round a few places we did manage to find a suitable Ford Fiesta (2000 registration) which would do nicely. It had done a good few miles (about 80,000) but it looked like it had been cared for and for the miles she’s likely to be doing will probably be fine. It was miles better than the Ford Ka we tried the week before anyway!

On Sunday we went to the morning service and Sunday@6 as per usual. Not much to say really – we had a nice quiet afternoon! Afterwards we came back home and watched Top Gear, which was very funny once again. And… that’s pretty much it for the weekend!

This is a rant which has been coming for a while now. The catalyst was this story on The Register. It’s all to do with feminism and glamour modelling.

Personally I feel that suffragettes who chained themselves to railings to secure a vote for women would be appalled if they found out that you can buy a newspaper today and find images of topless girls plastered all over them. I just can’t reconcile equality with girls willingly putting themselves forward to do topless modelling.

The article I mentioned picks up on that. The basic idea is that a group of women got naked for a “Calendar Girls” style calendar, in order to benefit charity. They tried to donate some money to Scottish Women’s Aid, but were refused because they didn’t condone women taking their clothes off to raise money.

Although I can’t comment about the calendar itself (I haven’t seen it), I do somewhat agree with this quote from a spokeswoman for the charity Zero Tolerance:

“…We should be showcasing women for their talents and aspirations. Anything that focuses on women’s bodies is not helpful.

“We live in a culture where female nudity is everywhere and there is too much female nudity… and not enough celebration of women’s brains. It undermines our work to achieve gender equality.”

And this is what bemuses me. I completely agree with equality: women and men should have the same opportunities, and generally be treated equally. I cannot square this with posing topless in newspapers and magazines – surely an enemy of equality is objectifying women, i.e. men viewing women as sexual ‘objects’?

The attitude that “it’s our right to do as we want and pose in these magazines” seems to be highly detrimental to the right of equality. As long as a few women are willingly exposing their bodies to be, for want of a better word, ogled, then some men are going to continue viewing women as objects. I understand that I sound like I’m coming straight out of the 1950s here but … am I just going mad? Or is this actually an issue other people feel strongly about?